Outright

As small business owners, the goal is to be successful and grow your business. Growing a business takes a great deal of work, endless tweaking of products and services along with countless hours spent bookkeeping and accounting. Outright promises to practically eliminate the time involved in one of those tasks.

The Service

Outright is targeted towards small business owners, usually sole-proprietors or single member companies. Their mission is to help owners eliminate the hours spent performing accounting and bookkeeping tasks.

Outright gathers all your business financial information and organizes it to visually display the results in a clear and understandable way. Through charts, graphs and lists, Outright shows where the money comes in and where it goes out.

The information Outright uses is pulled from a variety of sources. Records from financial institutions like banks, credit unions, credit cards and Paypal along with income generating sites like ebay and Etsy are synced with Outright to break down costs.

Interface / Usage

Through the use of categories and transaction type, Outright is able to organize expenses in a visually appealing way. Users can even track money collected versus money still owed. The line item detail is what many users expect so the initial learning curve on Outright is small.

Charts are the big draw with Outright as they quickly show a breakdown of all financial details. Expense charts can show which fees are growing and what percentage of income is used towards them. Outright uses history to deliver customer charts which highlight the best customers and where business opportunities are the most profitable.

Additional Features

If you’ve been an owner for a while, then you’ve likely gone through the headache of taxes. Outright is like your accountant, preparing tax information and aiding with estimated taxes. Taxes are a huge burden for sole-proprietors and as such, Outright remembers and tracks transactions to properly organize them for tax preparation. The system alerts users of deadlines and creates a Schedule C if desired.

While we don’t necessarily consider security a ‘feature’, we do appreciate that Outright uses 256-bit SSL security for their service. Anything less would be held to criticism so it’s good to see a company take charge of securing their service from the start.

Outright is cloud based which means data is stored on their servers which allows users to access their data from anywhere.

Summary

Outright is absolutely ideal for the small business owner that needs more than what simple invoicing services offer and desires financial tracking. The interface is clean, the data is incredibly easy to read and it allows users to make preliminary financial decisions at a glance.

Outright isn’t a Quickbooks replacement, although we’d argue that Quickbooks is way more than most small businesses need and significantly over priced. Outright isn’t confounding with its data input and analysis. Financial information is put in and consolidated data is the result.

Tax aid is a nice plus and is sure to attract users who shiver at the thought of calculating taxes. Though Outright is a financial manager, no money actually passes through the service. It is simply a gathering and sorting platform where transactions do not exist.

Final Thoughts

Outright provides a quality service that many will embrace as a means to free up time away from accounting tasks. The service is not free at $9.95/month, though a free trial period is offered.

We do recommend Outright for anyone who needs to get their finances and accounting in order. For everyone else who has an established system in place, you’ll need to decide if the cost for their service is worth the monthly investment.

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[…] As small business owners, the goal is to be successful and grow your business. Growing a business takes a great deal of work, endless tweaking of products and services along with countless hours spent bookkeeping and accounting. Outright promises to practically eliminate the time involved in one of those tasks. Continue..Read more about Outright. […]